and reflects on life…

‘The Organized Mind’ by Daniel Levitin

First, a small confession, or at least, something you might want to know about why I read non-fiction. It’s not always to learn what the author thinks I want to know. Or at least, not to take notes on what they want me to take from the book. I read non-fiction mainly for pleasure, to make connections between what the author tells me and… something else, sometimes not even related to the subject matter.

The aim of the author is to help you apply the general principles the book covers to “recapture a sense of order, and to regain the hours of lost time spent trying to overcome the disorganized mind.”

I’ve enjoyed reading this book very much. It’s entertained me. And like all good non-fiction books, it put into words my own thoughts in much better ways than I ever could!

“The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.”

“Happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have.”

“A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.”

“Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that many of our experiences share similarities with one another, and so when trying to re-create them in memory, the brain can get fooled by competing items.”

“Now more people have cell phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their cell phones to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.””

“The more cognitive load one is experiencing, the more likely one is to make errors in judgment about the causes of an individual’s behavior.”

All quotes from Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Published by Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.